An Unlikely Path

How did an artist and activist fresh out of college wind up opening a vegetarian restaurant and community center just up the street from H.H. the Dalai Lama, and how did that funky little café in the Himalayan foothills spawn a charitable organization working for sustainable living and cross-cultural collaboration across the globe?

In 1994, I set out with a couple of friends on what was meant to be a year-long, round-the-world journey. We wanted to see who lives on planet earth, learn about what it means to be human, and try to make a difference along the way. Something happened halfway around the globe, however, that stopped us in our tracks: a ten-day discourse from the Dalai Lama on the Path of the Bodhisattva — the life of the engaged contemplative who dedicates herself to the altruistic intention to realize her full potential in order support others to do the same.

It was a life-changer. Everything we were looking for was here, we reasoned, so why go any further? We tore up our onward tickets and set ourselves on the cushion, and also started asking around about volunteer work. If we were going to be here for a while, how could we make ourselves useful?

No adequate caption for this experience…

One thing leads to another (even more fortuitously than average in Dharamshala) and, in the summer of 1995, I had the great blessing of my first private meeting with His Holiness, in which he very generously advised me on the vision that would become the Earthville Network and a full-time adventure for the next seventeen years (and counting) of my life, laying the groundwork for a global network of local initiatives for a more compassionate and sustainable world.

There was some context for this: In 1992, as a senior in college, I had spent a semester in Nepal, living with a materially poor (but joy-rich) family in their one-room mud house just below the Tibetan border. I was profoundly inspired by the extraordinary wisdom, resourcefulness, and kindness of the peoples of the Himalayas, yet also alarmed by the destructive impact of unplanned and unsustainable “development” in the region. Recognizing that change is inevitable but can be shaped to some degree for the better, and aspiring to help build bridges of understanding, appreciation, and altruistic collaboration across cultures, I began organizing a global community of kindred spirits committed to developing and promoting holistic and replicable solutions for compassionate living and sustainable development, starting locally and networking internationally.

A Café in the Clouds & a Vortex of Virtue

In 1997, my friends (Scarth Locke and Dara Ackerman) and I, in partnership with local collaborators, opened the doors of the first Earthville project, the Dharamshala Earthville Institute (DEVI) and KhanaNirvana Community Café, in McLeodGanj, the exile home of the Dalai Lama and the Tibetan Government in Exile. Providing jobs, training, and language education for recently arrived Tibetan refugees, we cooked up tasty, all-natural vegetarian cuisine from around the world and served it to a colorful international crowd of seekers. We channeled the modest proceeds into efforts (our own and others’) to develop educational and community building programs in Dharamshala, such as computer training for Tibetan refugees and vaccinations for local street dogs.

Documentary Night at KhanaNirvana/DEVI

At KhanaNirvana/DEVI, we held weekly talks from former Tibetan prisoners of consciences (many of whom had been imprisoned and tortured brutally for “crimes” such as saying the name of the Dalai Lama or having his photograph). We showed documentary films on Tibet, Buddhism, India, and other topics of regional or spiritual interest. And we had lively open mic nights with music and poetry of every description. And, in the midst of this, the best part happened: connections. KN/DEVI became a fertile nexus for fruitful meetings, recruiting new volunteers for local NGOs, matchmaking our diverse visitors’ gifts with the local students or agencies who could benefit from them, collecting blankets and medicines for our friends with leprosy, and endless streams of other good things.

DEVI was intended as a first step – a staging ground for launching other activities that would gradually flesh out the larger Earthville vision. This expansion happened quite naturally, as many altruistically oriented people from around the world who passed through Dharamshala made connections at DEVI, which naturally led to friendships that evolved into partnerships and projects.

One of the first such friends was Azriel Cohen (who recently passed away, in October 2012, and is pictured in the center of the photo at the top of this page, immediately to the right of the Dalai Lama). Azriel came from an orthodox Jewish background and had traveled far, both geographically and psychologically, to discover for himself why so many Jews had been drawn to India. At the trailhead of his journey, he read The Jew in the Lotus, Rodger Kamenetz’s fascinating and penetrating account of the first historic meetings between a delegation of Jewish leaders and the Dalai Lama (and, through that lens, the human search for deeper connection). Following that trail led Azriel to DEVI and to us, and we began organizing Jewish, Buddhist, Jewish-Buddhist, and Interfaith programs that eventually came full circle by bringing Rodger back to Dharamshala as a guest educator and facilitator in our passover program. This truly unique seder and month-long interfaith program was attended by several hundred people from every imaginable background, all coming together first in curiosity, then in compassion, and gradually in burgeoning love.

The Next Level: Dharmalaya

The newly-sprouting Dharmalaya campus

Fast-forward a decade. Having handed DEVI and KhanaNirvana over to our very capable Tibetan refugee staff, I moved two hours to the east to the village of Bir, a small and yet-unspoiled settlement of a few hundred Indian families and one of the earliest Tibetan refugee colonies in India. There, we receive a warm local welcome to establish the next step in the Earthville vision: a rural eco-campus for sustainable and compassionate living. With the generous support of Didi Contractor, one of the most preeminent vernacular architects in northern India, and an enthusiastic crew of local labourers keen to learn the dying arts of the traditional eco-building styles of the region, we set about creating the Dharmalaya Institute for Compassionate Living.

Before the first building of the Dharmalaya campus was even half-finished, we held our first “integration retreat,” a ten-day program organized in collaboration with our friends from SanghaSeva, which combined meditation in the mornings and evenings with mindful and joyful volunteer work in the afternoons. Participants made mud bricks with the locals, and then learned to build adobe walls. Organic gardening and permaculture landscaping were among the other “work meditations” on offer. The goal of these programs is threefold:

To provide a vehicle to help us take the warmth from the meditation cushion or the yoga mat and apply it in our work and social lives;

To create a model of immersive, contemplative ecotourism that allows visitors to break through the tourist bubble and have authentic and meaningful contact with the good peoples of the Himalayas; and

To establish a local green economy that creates fairly-compensated employment for low-income villagers and especially to create empowering opportunities for women of so-called “low caste.”

At the end of a happy work retreat

Since then, we’ve done two more similar retreat programs and the experiences of both the locals and the international participants in these programs have been life-changing in many cases. Considering that we haven’t even officially opened yet, we imagine this bodes well for the future.

Once the building is complete and the Dharmalaya Institute opens to the public, we will host a variety of service-learning programs in various aspects of sustainable and compassionate living, including classes, workshops, and retreats. We’re already running a weekly meditation group (seasonally). We hope to carry forward the magic of the interfaith programs that began in Dharamshala, and take them even deeper in a beautiful natural setting where our guests and volunteers can stay a while and find their own ways to plug into this dynamic mix of social and ecological learning and service in a contemplative environment.

Help Us Launch this Innovative Campus

Raising the Roof

In the last four years, we’ve launched a innovative NGO, raised around $80,000, created green jobs for dozens of Himalayan villagers, hosted over a hundred volunteers from India and over 25 other countries, completed about 90% of the beautiful new adobe-and-bamboo building that will serve as the HQ of our eco-campus, and changed a few lives along the way.

Once the doors of the Institute open to guests, the project will have a steady steam of income to sustain itself, but we need public support to make the last step to reach that point.

Share:

The first building on the new eco-campus of the Dharmalaya Institute is just two steps away from being ready to welcome the public, and Dharmalaya needs your help to reach the finish line.

The neotraditional adobe-and-bamboo building survived its second heavy monsoon season in perfect shape, thanks to the dedicated team of Himachali craftsmen, local labourers, and many Indian and international volunteers who did great work last spring to complete the roof and the most important windows from March through June.

Most of the remaining work must be completed by March, and that’s where we need your help…

Share:

After a marathon rush of construction activity through the winter, Dharmalaya held its first programmes in the new (and still-unfinished) main building of the Dharmalaya Institute. Over thirty participants from ten countries made the journey to Bir for the occasion.

Organised in collaboration with SanghaSeva, the inaugural programmes included a one-week silent meditation retreat led by Ajay Pal Singh, who also gave commentaries on the songs of the great Indian poet Kabir, followed by a twelve-day service-learning retreat on the topic of sustainable living in the Himalayas.

Share:

The biggest news on the construction of the Dharmalaya Institute is in regard to our race against time to get the roof on our baby building before the onslaught of the monsoon rains this month… and the update is that, well, we couldn’t win, so we’ve done our best to change the game.

To understand the snag, one must first have an idea of the way traditional roofs are built here in Bir and around the Kangra Valley. Local roofs are gable roofs made of slate shingles fastened to a truss of wooden struts supported by bamboo rafters. The strength of the roof relies primarily upon the bamboo, and the strength of the bamboo, in turn, depends upon not only size and age of the bamboo but also the time of year when it is harvested.

For maximum durability, the bamboo must be cut during the new moon of late December or early January. If that sounds like hocus pocus, then consider that this is the time of year when the plant is most dormant and thus its sugar content is lowest. If bamboo is cut at other times of year, the more plentiful sugars harden as starches, a delicacy for termites and other critters. When feasted upon, such bamboo loses much of its strength and no longer can be counted upon to do its job holding the building up (and so must be replaced, generally within 10-15 years). When bamboo is cut at its most dormant moment, however, it contains very little that is appetizing to insects and thus the structural integrity and strength of the bamboo remains intact for decades (and, in some cases, such as when it is thoroughly smoked, it can last for centuries).

Share:

For our first service retreat program at the Dharmalaya Institute in Bir, our friends at SanghaSeva brought sixteen wonderful, hard-working volunteers from all over the globe to work with us, so we took on a major project that could only be done with that kind of person power: landscaping a landslide to create a vertical orchard!

Share:

This month, the Dharmalaya Institute (a project of the Earthville Network) hosted its first service retreat program for international volunteers on its new eco-campus near the remote village of Bir in the Indian Himalayas. Organized in collaboration with SanghaSeva, the retreat welcomed sixteen participants from eight countries for ten days of volunteer work, group activity, meditation, and contemplation…

Share:

The Earthville Network is pleased to announce the launch of the Earthville Orchards, a win-win-win-win opportunity for conscientious global citizens and responsible businesses to sponsor tree plantings in order to offset their carbon footprints while creating green jobs for Indian villagers and more…

Share:

So much in life can’t happen without the kindness of others, and this is especially true here in the Himalayas.

In a “subsistence-plus” economy such as we have here in Himachal Pradesh, most villagers have enough land to feed their families, more or less, so they don’t necessarily need to work for anyone but themselves in order to survive. Like their fellow humans across the globe, though, modern Himalayan villagers seek more than mere survival. They want some comfort and convenience, and they want a better life for their children.

The costs of staple foods, fuel, and energy are rising continually and, these days, a lot of the locals also want an addition to their home and an upgrade from bicycle to scooter to motorcycle to car — maybe even an iPhone. Even in the enchanted forests of the Himalayas, these things don’t grow on trees. If you want anything more than you can grow on your own land, you’ll need to find paid work. For all of these reasons, most of the villagers here must look for outside jobs.

Even so, they don’t show up for work just because you pay them. If these dignified Himalayan villagers leave their own land to work for someone else, it’s not only because the wages are compelling, but also because they think the work itself is worth doing and they have a reasonable degree of respect for the people with whom and for whom they’re working. Otherwise, most self-respecting Himachalis would sooner stay home (and, truth be told, they often do, as anyone who has tried to build or repair something here will attest).

So, in such a climate, what happens when the work to be done is even more difficult than usual, the location remote, and the conditions somewhat unreasonable? And what if the one who needs the work done is a nonprofit organization with a sandal-strap budget and a mountain to scale?

Share:

A familiar sea of humans, cows, and three-wheeled auto-rickshaws… with some new features: People of all stripes gathering around giant outdoor projection screens to cheer every turn of the Indian athletes in the Commonwealth Games… Brand new Delhi Metro terminals, still not-quite-finished and already falling apart, teeming with hurried passengers, mostly unfazed as twelve more press themselves into the already-packed subway car… iPhone ringtones fill the air as police, no doubt instructed to put a new face on Delhi’s streets for the Games, remove beggars from their usual spots… Young women in uniform holding rifles very nearly their height peoplewatch like ghosts in the swarms of shoppers… A slice of New Delhi in 2010.

Tomorrow, the long, dusty road to Himachal Pradesh, a crumbling wagon trail of a thoroughfare with (very) slowly elongating patches of smooth black tarmac, always under construction (inconvenience regretted). It’s there that i’ll begin to feel strangely at home again, as the concrete monstrosities (“biggest and longest mall north of Delhi,” boasts one sign) gradually give way to what remains of the rustic beauty of the villages.

The purpose of the journey? A tiny effort to preserve a speck of that beauty in the face of all this “development,” and a humble aspiration to inspire and train interested villagers and visiting global citizens to do the same. Our budding sustainability project in the Himalayan foothills will take a big little step in the coming weeks: the stone foundations of our new baby, the Dharmalaya Institute, spent the last four months settling and curing in the monsoon rains, and soon we’ll start raising her lovely mud walls…